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Ireland
By book or by crook

By Lowell Courtney, LynchPin Tours

To paraphrase the great O. Henry (who was anything but an Irishman), this article is intended to be a cross between a literary lecture and a good pub guide.

Let me explain the long and the short of it. The long: A tourist walks into the late playwright John B Keane’s bar in Listowel and engages in conversation with Kerry’s answer to a good ol’ boy. The conversation hops along as merrily an early morning rabbit on the links at nearby Ballybunion until our guest asks innocently, “Tell me, have you lived in Listowel all your life?”  “Not yet” replies your man.

The short: the hard-drinking, ex-IRA playwright Brendan Behan was once asked by an earnest BBC interviewer, “Tell me, Mr. Behan, do you believe in God?” “Ah,” says Behan. “I’m a daylight atheist.”

Now those two stories will tell you more about Irish writing than any number of doctoral theses, for whilst Ireland is the literary equivalent of the most delectable millefeuille you ever tasted, it is not meant to be taken at anything remotely near face value.

Every June 16 (and no more so than this year’s centenary of the Leopold Bloom’s wonderful odyssey in 1904) you will find devotees of the late lamented Mister Joyce (and there’s no equal to a Dublin barman of the old school in reducing those who stand upon their appellation to the status of Junior Mullah, third class – acting) taking the air around the streets of Dublin’s fair city. And all the while, the good citizens of Strumpet City are going about their business and ignoring the literary eruptions in their midst.

For many years, the Irish government has offered a tax exemption to writers, sculptors, poets and anyone else who can make a reasonable claim to be an “artist.” This has not stopped the general populace from regarding anyone with literary aspirations as possibly work-shy, probably certifiable and almost certainly fiddling the books.  And yet Joe Citizen will probably stare deep into his pint and pronounce the immortal words, “And fair play to him.”

The late Brian Nolan (Flann O’Brien) may have depicted Ireland as “a nation of begrudgers,” but at least the prosperity of the last 25 years has meant that the begrudgery is more muted.

I have before me a map of Ireland which our wonderful new all-island tourism body has produced. Like a bemeasled child, it is covered with red dots, representing the areas in which this or that literary lion prowled. The statisticians would point to a fair distribution across the island. Of course Dublin has the big hitters, but the West has Yeats and McGahern; the south, O’Connor and O’Faolain; and the north – ah, the north.

You see, I am from the north, the black, black north, defended by the Black Pig Dyke and fortified by Black Bush (nothing to do with the White House) whiskey (with an “e”, if you please.)  And whilst our one big name is the 1997 Nobel Literature Laureate, Seamus Heaney, we belie our reputation as dour, God-fearing inhabitants of the black hole of the imagination.

In my work as a tour guide, I often take visitors round the – shall we say “less salubrious” – areas of my native city and the political and cultural wall pictures illustrate the well-known lines about the “moving finger writes,” penned by a late Victorian but sadly unheralded Irish poet, O’Markiam. 

You will probably also not have heard of John Hewitt, although he has achieved the ultimate status symbol of the Irish writer: a posthumous summer school.  But his lines on Belfast are as clean a piledriver as Muhammad Ali ever delivered:

It’s to hell with the future
And God bless the past;
May the Lord in His mercy
Look down on Belfast.

This is one of the keys to Irish literature.  There are no great theological or philosophical polemics; no sweeping Tolstoian canvases of “Night Watch” proportions; no genteel etchings of the comedy of human manners. But there are moments where the light of human experience – almost always under duress – falls obliquely across the landscape of those people who, for better or worse, happen to be transiting this island life for an all too brief moment.

It would be inaccurate – and most likely dishonest – to say that one could re-create the mood of a day in Joyce’s Dublin or Yeats’ Sligo. Indeed, if the statue of Molly Malone at the foot of Grafton Street is known as “The Tart with the Cart” and Anna Livia in O’Connell Street is “The Floozy in the Jacuzzi,” then I leave to your imagination the local name for the dilettante depiction of William Butler himself outside the Ulster Bank in Sligo.

But you should not take these vulgarities as disrespect. They are a “fair play” acknowledgement of the status which these characters – authors, heroes, villains and the great Common People of Ireland – have acquired. And to travel in Ireland, especially in the lesser known corners, is to begin to appreciate the forces which produced the writers of their day and the very forces which are at work in shaping the literature of tomorrow.

As John Hewitt suggested, for too much of our time we were drunk round the Bonfire of Profanities. The curse of poverty, the paralysis of history and the crutch of alcohol. Minorities aside, the people of Ireland are moving on; some for better, some for worse. To visit Ireland now is to see a society, to meet people, especially in the remoter parts, who are struggling to retain the best of tradition and to select those aspects of the future which will enhance.

Go see Brian Friel’s great play, “Translations,” about the arrival of the English-speaking soldiers of the Ordnance Survey amongst the Irish-speaking peasantry. Then come to the Tower Museum in Doire/Derry/Londonderry and let us show you the notes which Lt. Colby and his men made and the very theodolite which they used to take the first accurate measurements of the British Isles. If that doesn’t remind you of Lewis & Clark – or Mason & Dixon – then the connection between literature and life will be broken – and we will all be the poorer for it.